Website Design and development

The addictive nature of coding

Coding is addictive, not in a mug a granny to get your next hit kind of way, but in scratch that itch keep scratching compulsive way. Finish sorting out feature A then drift on to adding feature B and then before you know it hours have gone by and your adding feature D. Perhaps because its tinkering if I just change this then that will work better but if I change that again then in that circumstance this can be better …

So the temptation becomes solve this problem with more code or scratch that itch. If you ask a developer the answer to a problem is more code, in the same way as if you ask a lawyer its more law or a spider its more webs, its in their nature.

Computers are for computing stuff, they aren’t an end in themselves, more programs running on more computers won’t necessarily make the world a better place. Just more complicated and with more and more points of interaction. In a more and more divorced from reality world.

How does this affect the real world? or if the code was a black box you were using from the outside would you care about this? Probably in many circumstances no, the end user doesn’t care about speed or how it works at all until it doesn’t or it crawls to what to you seems a halt.

If your in a hole and you keep digging your creating a deeper rabbit hole until it starts filling up with water and you drown.

Could this resolved without code is a question to ask or similarly with less code, libraries and dependencies.
In short first stop and think is the solution more code.